MetaCatholic

This month, April DeConick has had one series of posts, and begun another on the status of the Nag Hammadi texts in scholarship. Both are worth reading, together with the range of reactions. Scholarship, of course, does not exist in a vacuum, which is also why I contended earlier that it was primarily the uses made of the texts that led to problems, not their existence.

 On the Amazon UK site, there are two lay reviews of Meyer and Robinson’s The Nag Hammadi Scriptures: The Definitive International Edition which go some way to illustrating the problems of the non-scholarly context. Here’s the first:

This is not in harmony with any of the Gospels, there is only one writing in this that seemed to hold with the Truth and that is a very small letter writings of Melchizedek. I only read in samples, I decided I needed to dispose of this book as I sensed it was NOT healthy to even have it in my home. I am thankful that I bought it just so that I could warn Christians to stay away.

This view of “unsound texts” as contagious does, it seems to me, have its academic equivalent, which is nowhere so naively expressed as this, but does believe that undue attention to these texts endangers claims to the historicity of orthodoxy. Hence “lateness” is used to stigmatise them, and put them largely beyond use. In one sense they do belong more with the study of the second century on, than with the study of the first. Equally, one has to ask what it was about the early Christian gospel that generated these competing readings, and so with careful use they may be illuminating of the first century.

The second review is the polar opposite of the first:

The ancient texts were found buried in Egyptian soil in the year 1945, and they gave a better view to origins of Christianity. The gnostic view. In place of blind faith the inner knowledge of oneself (=gnosis) is seen to be the key factor in one’s religious experience.  The Nag Hammadi texts were not included in the Bible for some hazy reasons/irrationalities, and one can see that the Bible is missing many points of view. It takes some patience to read the Nag Hammadi texts too, but the new views to existing concepts are definetely worth it. — The jealous God of Moses’n'Israel was not good at all, true Jesus was not crucified, the world is seen as a mere illusion, Holy Spirit is associated with thought/thinking, Jesus with knowledge of truth, God with true love, etc…

The claim here is in one sense that of conspiracy theory, and again it has its academic counterparts. Hidden texts are equated with hidden truth: if someone concealed it, it must be because it is true (and therefore dangerous to those who hold power).  In academic terms, the view is that only with these texts does real primitive Christianity come fully into focus, as we better appreciate the range of Christian options before orthodoxy suppressed some of them. For some, therefore, there is no orthodox (or mainline, or catholic) Christianity before the third century, and orthodoxy is a creation of ecclesial power.

Here, I want to voice a moderate scepticism. Yes, these texts show us something of some groups speaking in their own voice, whereas before we had them speaking only as the orthodox ventriloquist’s heterodox dummy. That is very valuable. But what we know about the existence and spread of the groups is still largely dependent on the same sources as before their discovery. All else is reconstruction. It is possible to reconstruct a history in which they were always perceived as a minority group within a larger but still diverse catholic Christianity, and it is possible to reconstruct a history in which there was no mainstream catholic Christianity but simply different competing groups.

The long burial and late rediscovery of these texts has decontextualised them enough to make such reconstructions problematic, so that all sorts of history may be deduced from them, hiding in the interstices of a limited public record. My own view is that these texts may usefully and valuably flesh out and modify the previously existing picture of a developing catholic Christianity, but they don’t, in fact, either threaten it or destroy it. They are not, after all, simply to be weighed against canonical scripture (as is sometimes implied), but a range of writing through the Apostolic Fathers, Justin, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Tatian and more that already gave us a diverse picture, bearing witness to the emerging canon of scripture, and with a clear thread of catholic continuity and development.